Marcel L'Herbier | L'Homme du large (The Man of the Sea) / 1920

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by Douglas Messerli

 

Marcel L'Herbier (scenario, based on a story by Honoré de Balzac, and director) L'Homme du large (The Man of the Sea) / 1920

 

Despite the fact that Gaumont issued a restored DVD of Marcel L’Herbier’s L'Homme du large (Man of the Sea) in 2009, the film is still quite difficult to obtain in a home US regional DVD version or on the internet.

      A couple of years back I was fortunate enough to see a video of a live broadcast of the film from the San Francisco Silent Film Festival on-line, and since then I have studied several briefer video summaries of the film which has allowed me to capture some vital images from the film. However, I still must rely on several other sources to fully describe the story and significance of events.

 

     After L’Herbier’s success with Le Carnaval des vérités (1920), Léon Gaumont and his studio provided the director with far greater resources for his next film, and in the spring of 1920 L’Herbier penned a scenario loosely based on the story of Honoré de Balzac “Un drame au bord de la mer,” which like his previous movie would be shot against the backdrop of the sea of Brittany, which itself would become a protagonist in the film. Naming the work L'Homme du large, he added the subtitle “Marine,” or “seascape.”

      The scenario L’Herbier created is rather simple and straight-forward but his images speak an entirely different language.

       The devout, pertinacious Breton fisherman Nolff (Roger Karl), has taken a vow of silence, now living the life a hermit beside the sea. The only person with whom he has contact is a white costumed novice who brings him his meals.

       Years ago, with disregard for his fellow men and life on the land, Nolff had built his house on a remote cliff, devoting his life to fishing and caring for his wife (Claire Prélia) and two children, his hard-working and obedient daughter Djenna (Marcelle Pradot), and his son Michel (Jaque Catelain), who as his male heir, he adored in patriarchal manner, determined to bring him up as “a free man, a sailor.”

 

     Michel however is weak and spoiled, taking advantage of his father’s affection for him. L’Herbier’s images show him continually imitating the worst of human traits—at one point stealing his father’s pipe and smoking it as a child, with his father misinterpreting it as an attempt to be a strong male figure like himself. L’Herbier, however, presents the young Michel as a kind of sissy, as when his father first attempts to take him on his fishing boat, the boy holds back in terror, preferring to lay and play on the sand.

      As he grows somewhat older Michel also becomes addicted to the attractions of the town upon which his father has turned his back, and is lured into further bad behavior by his friend Gueen-la-Taupe (Charles Boyer).

      Easter is the only time of the year when Nolff and his family join in the festivities of the townspeople. But on this particular holiday, Nolff’s wife becomes ill, her husband returning home with her.

      Michel, meanwhile, escapes to the town bar to consort with the dancer Lia (Suzanne Doris). But once more L’Herbier presents a far more complex set of representations of Michel’s bar life, showing us a scene of wild open love-making, rowdy behavior, lesbian liaisons and other activities which we might imagine in a Berlin club of the period instead of a French coastal village.

     The mother becomes so ill that Djenna is sent to bring him home to his mother’s bedside. Michel, however, slips away and returns to the bar. While she calls out to him in a fever from her bed, we see, in one episode, the boy’s best friend turning toward him as if about to plant a kiss upon his lips.

 

       Later at the bar Michel gets into a fight with Lia’s protecting lover and stabs him. Locked away in jail, Michel is finally released when Nolff arrives with a payment; by the time they return home they discover the mother has died.

         In order to further attract Lia, Michel feels he needs more money and steals the savings his mother had put away for Djenna for a future without the support of her father or other men. Nolff catches him in the act and vows to “return him to God,” tying Michael down in the haul of an open boat and pushing it out to sea.

         It is for these reasons that Nolff has become a hermit.

         Djenna, meanwhile has entered a convent, where she receives a letter from Michel, who has clearly survived and is now working as a sailor, having become a changed man. When Nolff hears that his son now wants to return home, he cries to the sea in remorse for his inhuman judgment against the boy.

         What is truly remarkable in this film is L’Herbier’s cinematographic effects and his original use of intertitles, showing them in conjunction with the action rather than presenting them before her after, and presenting them in different typestyles that helped to convey the characters of which they spoke. In an essay written in conjunction with the San Francisco Silent Cinema Festival, Chris Edwards nicely summarizes some of these effects:

 

 “An early intertitle describes Nolff in a typeface recalling carved stone. Intertitles concerning Marcel feature a swirling background, while those about Djenna depict tidy gardens. L’Herbier’s dramatic wipes, irises in and out, and masking techniques emphasize certain characters or their actions, or draw from already powerful landscapes something more precise. In one early scene he masks a cliffside into the shape of a cross, surrounding it with words, making it both shot and intertitle. Later he masks the rocks into a “V,” while, at the top of the screen we see a woman strolling. It’s almost as though she’s headed for a steep-sided pit. To see these effects on screen is a reminder that they could be seen nowhere else.”

 

      The scenes were also tinted in various colors, once again representing the emotional states of the work’s major characters, white for the early austere scenes of Nolff’s hermit-like existence, blue for nearly all sea-side scenes, and yellow and red for the interiors of the riotous town bar.

      The 85-minute film was a great public success and led to further collaborations with the studio. French censors protested the film’s lesbian scenes, forcing L’Herbier to cut them out; but he quickly returned them to the film soon after.

      What L’Herbier helped to create in this film was a work that moved away from the restrictions of theater (and all its forms including dance, music hall, vaudeville, and burlesque) and fiction with which movies had been so closely linked. Perceiving L’Herbier as an early French Cinema Impressionist, English film critic Charles Drazin wrote “What they had in common was a desire to forge a ‘pure cinema’ observing its own rules, free from the undermining conventions of the theatre.” And clearly with this work, L’Herbier took cinema further in that direction, while also creating with new liberty a work that involved what we now recognize as basically a gay hero, an outsider to his own family, disowned, and forced to become a man with his own identity.

     Sailors, after all, can be either God-believing fisherman settled in small, isolated villages throughout the world such as Nolff or be world travelers, like Herman Melville or Jean Genet’s Querelle, who through their travels come to recognize the wider possibilities of social and sexual life. By film’s end Michel has possibly become the latter.

 

Los Angeles, April 26, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).